She can't afford to. And maybe, if the neighborhood improves in the right ways, she won't feel the need.

Minutes from downtown's residential boom, her St. Clair-Superior neighborhood has more than 430 vacant homes. That's about one out every four houses.

Still, Henderson says, it's an improvement over few years ago, mostly because many of the dangerous eyesores have been knocked down. They are among more than 11,000 city-wide that have been demolished in the aftermath of the foreclosure crisis.

Roughly a third of the lots in the neighborhood are vacant.

The vacant lots are not the only signs of change. A new group of pioneers has begun placing bets on the area's potential.

Montana the 'mayor'

On a crisp fall day, Henderson gives a tour of her block. It is bookended by a stretch of St. Clair Avenue dotted with thrift stores, bars and beverage markets, and a short cross street called Bliss Avenue.

She recites the histories of the homes that remain. There's the one owned by the elderly woman who left for a nursing home and never returned; the vacant home owned next door to the one owned by the man who was murdered; and the tidy place owned by her friend, Rocco, who splits his time between Cleveland and Florida.

"They call me the mayor of the street," Henderson jokes. "At least to my face. I don't know what they call me not to my face."

At 54, Henderson is retired from the Veterans Administration. After her almost-daily workout she walks her street, plucking up shreds of garbage, along with beer and liquor bottles.

When she sees problems, she calls the city for help.

"This is the one I've been raising hell about," Henderson said, pointing to a vacant home at 1068 E. 67th St. whose owner died years ago.

Until recently, squatters lived there.

Henderson thinks they were chased out, then returned. Certainly, someone busted the windows and stripped the siding, sending pieces of silver insulation into the wind.

"I'm just so disgusted," she says.

For years, she and neighbors begged for help with the homes that rotted around them.

Now, she can see at least four fresh vacant lots from her front porch.

She thinks each demolition makes life on the street a little more peaceful. It takes vigilance to keep the lots clean from dumping, though, and it irks her when the city mows around piles of abandoned construction debris and mattresses, instead of hauling them away. She hopes someday people will build on the lots.

Roll over the parcels on East 67th Street below to see the homes and the grades they received this summer.

Most of the remaining homes on Henderson's street are in decent condition, according to the Western Reserve Land Conservancy's Thriving Communities Institute property survey, conducted this summer. Only three rated a 'D' or 'F' grade. However, the wider neighborhood has the highest percentage of vacant distressed properties in the city, nearly 12 percent.

Others include: Kinsman, Glenville, Hough and Buckeye-Woodhill, all with around 9 percent of vacant properties rated "D" or "F".

But the city, under Mayor Frank Jackson, won't "encourage families to move out so we can demolish the last five houses on the street and create a new, vacant parcel for redevelopment," said Ken Silliman, Jackson's chief of staff.

"We do know that there are academics and others who argued for that kind of approach in some cities. We turned them away in Cleveland. We have no time for them."

Signs of rebirth

One vacant home on Henderson's street is far from distressed

It's at the end of the street closest to St. Clair Avenue. Students from Kent State's Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative transformed it this year into a sleek single-family living space. They hope to sell it to fund their next project.

Henderson peers through large glass doors, pondering who might live there. Someone adventurous, she guesses, not afraid of the sounds of urban life.

St. Clair-Superior Development Corp. Director Michael Fleming says his agency is on the lookout for other creative re-uses of buildings and homes. The agency also will take advantage of existing assets, like schools, churches, Rockefeller Park and the lakefront.

Big development projects, like Hub 55 and the soon-to-open Goldenhorn Brewery on E. 55th Street, should spur more interest, he said.

The area is still perceived as high-crime, though.

"People see the empty houses and think, 'this can't be safe.'"

Really, he said, reported crime doesn't differ much from Ohio City or Tremont, and the conditions and prices of houses in St. Clair-Superior make it more than competitive with trendier neighborhoods.

That, in part, is what attracted Al and Pamela Brill.

They have lived a peripatetic lifestyle, taking their three children to the Balkans and Canada. Five years ago, they settled in Cleveland.

Al says their travels gave his children a broad view of the world.

"They're not afraid to try new things," he said.

The family runs a web development company; they can be based anywhere.

Al and Pam, who grew up in Missouri, were intrigued by Cleveland's mid-western feel. And they liked the price of housing.

They looked for something big enough for their family, and found it on East 53rd Street, in Goodrich-Kirtland Park.

The pocket bordering downtown is relatively healthy, with only about 6 percent of its homes vacant and only 2 percent rated distressed.

"I think there is a nice neighborhood feel here," Brill said. "It would be hard to be more diverse than this neighborhood is."

The Brills have one adjacent neighbor. He shares his fishing catch. They share home-grown tomatoes and lettuce.

They worked with St. Clair Development to get a small plot of land to expand their garden.

"People threw trash on it and it was just going to waste," Brill said.

A neighbor on one side has lived in her home for 50 years. On the other side is a vacant home, with a porch so deteriorated it may fall into Brill's yard.

Brill said he's a great believer in resurrecting what can be resurrected, but some problem homes just need to be removed.

The trick, he said, is to improve the neighborhood without displacing the good neighbors who already live there.

Brill recalled that in the former Yugoslavia, President Josip Broz Tito gave parcels of coastal land to people. Flexible zoning allowed them to build multi-story row houses with bakeries or offices on the first floor, owner residences on the second, and tourist rentals up above.

Brill wonders whether Cleveland could invigorate its neighborhoods with a similar strategy, allowing people to earn where they sleep.

"It would be great to be able to have a brick-and-mortar office in the same place where we live," he said.

Henderson, who bought her house for about $25,000 back in 1991, when most of her neighbors were Eastern European immigrants, says she plans to stay. It's worth less than that now, which she hopes will change.

"I refuse to leave because where am I going to go?" she said. "Where ever you go there's going to be issues. You got to pray and the Lord will sustain you."